Coinbase's core trading services went down on May 7, leaving users unable to buy, sell, or trade cryptocurrencies. The culprit: a failure inside Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 Region, specifically the use1-az4 availability zone. The company disclosed the cause through its Coinbase Support channel.
What went wrong
The outage hit the US-EAST-1 Region's use1-az4 availability zone. AWS availability zones are clusters of data centers that run separate power and networking. When one zone fails, services that rely on it can go dark. Coinbase said the disruption was due to that specific zone failure, but did not detail how long the problem lasted or how many users were affected.
Coinbase's response
Coinbase Support posted the explanation, pinning the blame on AWS. The company did not provide a timeline for full restoration of trading. The incident underscores the vulnerability of crypto exchanges when a single cloud provider's infrastructure stumbles. Coinbase has not said whether it will adjust its cloud architecture to avoid a repeat.
As of the disclosure, the platform's core trading functions were still impacted. Users were left waiting for a fix, with no estimate given for when normal operations would resume.
